Thursday, March 20, 2008
There's a call at 3am...
Hopefully McCain won't grab his morning banana by mistake, and start talking into it.
But seriously, the insidious
"McCain is 'confused'" construction is getting a fair amount of play. And it's not the last time you will hear that meme, either.
Here's the headline at Ben Smith's Politico blog,
"Obama: Confused McCain has no strategy":In his speech in North Carolina today, Obama noted McCain's confusion yesterday between Sunni and Shiites, and said that McCain is focused on tactics to the exclusion of strategy. In his sharpest passage, he suggested that McCain's misunderstanding of the Middle East is why he supported the war in the first place — a sharp jab, though not really a serious contention:
"Just yesterday, we heard Sen. McCain confuse Sunni and Shiite, Iran and Al Qaeda. Maybe that is why he voted to go to war with a country that had no Al Qaeda ties. Maybe that is why he completely fails to understand that the war in Iraq has done more to embolden America’s enemies than any strategic choice that we have made in decades."
NY Sun:But while the McCain campaign is backing away from the specific claims about Iranian training of Al Qaeda, it is asserting that Iran collaborates with Osama bin Laden's organization.
Mr. McCain's national security adviser, Randy Scheunemann, told The New York Sun, "There is ample documentation that Iran has provided many different forms of support to Sunni extremists, including Al Qaeda as well as Shi'ia extremists in Iraq. It would require a willing suspension of disbelief to deny Iran supports Al Qaeda in Iraq."
Responding to Mr. Scheunemann's remarks, a senior foreign policy adviser to Senator Obama, Susan Rice, yesterday told the Sun, "It's very bizarre." She noted that Mr. McCain had "made the same statement three times in as many days. Surely he must know, as Senator Lieberman reminded him, that Iran is not engaged with Al Qaeda in Iraq. I don't know if he is confused, or is he cynically trying to conflate Al Qaeda and Iran as Cheney and Bush did Al Qaeda and Iraq in 2002 and 2003?"
TPM:Let me follow up on this McCain gaffe in which he got confused...
This is a much more devastating narrative than it might appear at first glance to non-politicos. Quite simply, the "McCain is confused" meme feeds into voters' fears that he is too old to be President. So every time he makes a gaffe, the "confused" description can be used by the Dems, and-- most importantly-- can be repeated over and over again with plausible deniability. Back in February,
McCain charged Obama with being "confused". That hardly made a dent. But when the tables are turned, it becomes a
very insidious and effective play.
For the record, I don't believe age is an issue for McCain. He's not too old, he's too wrong. The man's incredibly energetic on the campaign trail. Hoss is spry-- don't underestimate him, because he will out-work you!
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Update: Michael imagines a negative ad along these lines.
Labels: Iraq morass, McCain, Obama
9 Comments:
Yesterday I read somewhere... might have been FDL... wait a sec, I'll look it up...
Ok here it is Will McCain have Lieberman next to him at 3AM?
Also... why is it you only hear really really old people described as "spry"?
I don't know, but I'd be lying if I said that didn't factor into my decision to use it.
But I was serious about that last point. Mac could run circles around me on a daily basis. He's a machine. He could handle the physical demands of the Presidency much better than a lot of pols half his age.
Lieberman had to rescue him again - this time on Jewish holidays: http://thinkprogress.org/2008/03/20/lieberman-forced-to-correct-mccainagain/
Reality aside, and yeah, this is my cynicism on full display, I think the whole point with pinning "confused" or any other (presumably negative) label is to sort of prime the pump in hopes of achieving a Swift Boat effect. Lather, rinse, repeat, if it snowballs into a denial or, better yet, the political equivalent of an act of contrition, all the better. The most important element is repetition--if the attack survives a few news cycles, it becomes part of the folklore, and then the truth or falsehood no longer really matters.
Of course, this style makes a mockery of morality and/or ethics, but it's certainly become a big part of the Republican playbook (see Rove, Karl).
Our favorite succulent bivalve has scored a mention in Slate's "Today's Blogs" section!
http://www.slate.com/id/2187091
To my knowledge, within the most excellent NOLA blogosphere, only Dangerblond and Cliff (he of the Crib) have also been so honored. Maika'i no! (very fine, indeed)
Also note that both Politico and the NY Sun tend markedly toward the right. Are they being played by Obama's people, or are they piling on because they're among those conservatives who don't see McCain as a "true believer"?
Conflate's the right word. I was also struck by what Jonathan Alter said on Countdown last night (I assume you've read today's Daily Howler), but I thought that he was going to give a more nuanced version of what I said in response to your earlier McCain post. He (Alter) came close:
He corrects it, then part of him is thinking, well, why make a big deal of correcting this sense I want to conflate as you say and to convey to the American public that there are people in Iran who want to do us dirty. And if we have to kind of mess a little bit with the facts in order to convey the impression, he‘s willing to do that.
...
Well, first of all, the Democrats have to be careful not underplay the threat posed by Iran. Iran is making mischief inside Iraq.
But Alter didn't seem to have the backbone to explicitly offer the obvious possibility that McCain's made a cynical calculation, and Olbermann was more interested in the confused senior angle.
The Democrats could easily end up being portrayed as naive defenders of Iran. It could be that by accusing McCain of being confused, the Dems can show that he's being cynical, but it's going to be tricky.
So, Jeffrey, I guess we've got the spry McCain against the well-spoken (you haven't forgotten Joe Biden already, have you?) Obama.
Thanks for telling me about the slate link kamainna!-- *blows kiss through the intertubes*
BSJD: back up a sec and take a look at the larger pattern here. Mac has gotten severely "confused" about other stuff during the campaign.
Here's two examples (and there will be more):
global warming
AIDS/Contraception
Mac's misstatements feed into the "old and confused" narrative rather than "experienced and capable" image he wants to project. Now that a pattern has been established, (although not massively covered by the media) future misstatements will be exponentially more costly. When he does it with foreign policy issues, it's like a triple whammy.
In both of those cases, I actually think it's more cynicism than confusion. Well, cynicism combined with not giving a f***. If you cynically say what you think people want to hear, but can't be bothered to read the position papers, of course you're going to be confused about the implications of your statements, but it's not a matter of being addle-brained. But as I indicated, pointing out the apparent confusion might be the best way to shine light on the underlying lack of straigh talk.
Still, Iran could be tricky to call him on. If the Democrats send out talkers who get flustered when the Republicans they're on TV with start asking rhetorical questions about trusting Ahmadinejad and the mullahs, bringing it up could backfire.
